Most teams consider localization as simply changing the strings of the same products with just words.  Localization is not simply substituting. The App Store presents a classic case of this misconception. Just  configure the price in App Store Connect, and Apple will use exchange rates to calculate the price in all  currencies automatically. The price in Indian rupees may look accurate mathematically, but it will not make  sense in real life because it prices to what the dollar is worth, not to what that price actually feels like to  someone earning far less than a US income. True localized pricing involves pricing of every market  deliberately. Most of the time, automatic conversion is used, and hardly anybody changes it. 

Pricing is only the most obvious manifestation of an ongoing condition that affects the entire product. Currency,  imagery, legal requirements, different cultural perceptions of color, moves, and jokes: none of these should be  regarded as properties attached to a product once it is released. These are all parts of design. Do we have a price  per store or a price for the offered product with the respective currency mentioned in the product description?  Does the design system assume left-to-right text, or does it hold up the day someone needs Arabic? A product  designed without all these considerations will be difficult to adjust to other markets later. 

The applications developed by croncode, which include Numira, YourStyle, and Spylie, operate in various  international App Store locations, meaning that discussions about it were no longer theoretical. A numerology  application for interpreting people’s birth dates must take into account differences in date formats by country. A  fashion app must understand that something that seems refined in one country may look tacky and inappropriate  in another. Simply translating user interface strings does not solve this problem; the solution lies in the initial  decisions made prior to designing the first page of the application. 

App Store and Google Store do not simplify the process of international app sales. Apple uses a fixed price  ladder with 175 storefronts, and developers can manage the pricing for each storefront by hand. On the other  hand, Google takes prices in the local currency in the target country and does not have a price ladder. Thus, if  the company treats both stores as one and tries to establish one price for both marketplaces on one sheet of  paper, with one amount, it gets the wrong price in significant number of markets. 

Getting it right does not mean solving the problems of every market on the first day. Rather it is about creating a  product that allows the integration of markets without any major rewrites; a data model where currency and  locale are first class properties instead of a mere afterthought, a design system that doesn’t assume the same text  direction or image style works everywhere, and a pricing system where prices are reviewed per region rather  than being auto-converted and put aside. Revising this structure after launching twenty markets is much harder  than doing it before launching the first one.